Physicist Ruth McClung has handily won this week's Ten Buck Friday poll. Ruth is vying for Arizona's 7th Congressional District. Right up front, let me give you a Washington Examiner headline to introduce McClung: Big-name Dem in hot water against unknown but brilliant Ruth McClung. Arizona 7th is a seat Democrats believed a sure thing. Read on and see why panic is setting-in at the DNC and in Pelosi's uber-lush Speaker's office. See a video below on border security in Arizona's 7th.

Ruth McClung is currently employed as a rocket scientist (for real) at an Arizona engineering company.

She understands the science behind some very important issues such as energy, the environment, technology, defense, and national security. With her scientific background, politicians using pseudo-science to push an agenda will not fool her. And since she has worked in the defense industry, she understands the need for defense and the types of technologies which are needed to make us safer. She also understands where potential waste in the defense industry might be.

Arizona's 7th District is home to the second highest percentage of Hispanics in the state, and includes Tucson. Grijalva won his last election with 60 percent of the vote. In a Summit Consulting poll on October 4-5, Ruth was ahead in the poll 39-37 percent with 24% undecided. From Stacy McCain at The American Spectator, October 11:

Fifty percent of 7th District voters say they're ready to dump Grijalva, while McClung -- an attractive young physicist who works for a rocket engineering firm -- has begun capturing national attention.

Late Sunday night, I spoke to a Republican pollster in Arizona who had conducted a 7th District poll early last week and couldn't believe the result: McClung actually leading by 2 percentage points. So he polled the district again and got similar results. Now those surprising findings have been confirmed by the Magellan Strategies poll that struck alarm among Democrats. Independents in the district are breaking strongly toward the Republican, a Tea Party favorite who is also supported by about a fifth of voters who identify as Democrats.

Polls indicating a surge for McClung have had an important effect: Arizona's two Republican senators, John McCain and John Kyl, have reportedly started directing campaign donations and other resources toward the 7th District campaign. Within the next week, McClung's candidacy is expected to gain $100,000 worth of Republican support, in addition to a steadily increasing stream of online small-donor contributions from grassroots conservatives eager to defeat Grijalva, who is co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus.